


I don't want (to set the world on fire)

by OccasionallyCreative



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Death, F/M, Forests, Mild Gore, OP literally could have just written fluff instead but go off I guess, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Psychological Horror, That's Not How The Force Works, forests that probably want to eat you, reylo babies - brief mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 11:58:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14164353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OccasionallyCreative/pseuds/OccasionallyCreative
Summary: Rey goes on a mission to answer a distress signal on a Force-sensitive alien planet and finds something that might just save her if it doesn't lead to her ruin.





	I don't want (to set the world on fire)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a prompt from an anonymous ask on Tumblr: "meeting in the ER/A&E au". This was going to be fluff. Then I listened to the Annihilation soundtrack.

 

The air is crystalline here. It shimmers at the corner of her eye. The two suns of the planet beat hot on her skin. A fat bead of sweat rolls down the nape of her neck. Each sound (the wind, trees cracking, leaves rustling) is its own pulse, and it echoes in her ears. Flowers scatter through the long grass. They bloom an iridescent purple, opening and closing lazily.

Jakku was wild space, where a routine was key to survival and patience meant you lived. This, before her, is alien. Rey breathes, wiping the sweat from her neck.

“The distress signal’s faint, but there,” Rose says from behind. “In the middle of that forest.”

Her fingers drift over the blaster strapped to her hip. Whatever caused the vessel to crash-land here, her lightsaber will be useless against it.

Chewie growls gently beside her. He carries his bowcaster as the small group arrives at the edge of the forest.

She slides her attention towards Finn, at her side. She shares a brief, private glance with him. He senses it, empathetic without the Force (she envies him that, so often does she envy him), and nods comfort in return. He reaches back and links hands with Rose.

Rey tightens her grip on the blaster as she sinks to her knee. She leans forward, pressing her palm to the forest floor. The suns beat down as she closes her eyes.

She is thrown back to Ahch-To. Equal light, equal dark. Life, death. Decay and rebirth. Through it all, above it all, is the Force, pulsing at this planet’s core.

Rey stands. “We go forward,” she says, glancing back at the small group. Behind them stands the familiar silhouette of the Falcon. Its shape warps, wobbling for a second in the shimmer. She blinks and it stills. At the bottom of the ramp, Leia waits for them. The collar of her coat covers the lower half of her face, showing only her eyes. Strands of her grey hair flutter in the breeze.

Rey turns away and begins the walk past the boundary.

“How far are we from the signal?” she asks Rose, as they walk steadily through the long grass. Rey hears the charging of blaster rifles from the flank of Resistance soldiers.

“Ten kilometres, according to this reading.”

“How long until sunset?” she asks, tilting her head up. The shimmer moves with her, distorting the shapes of sunlight filtering through the trees.

“Three hours. We’ll make it,” Finn says, to her and the rest of the group. He feels like a leader. She feels like something to be put on display. As if every action she might take will be a story told some day. It’s a selfish feeling, and she buries it in favour of leading the charge.

This planet, so full of the Force, feels like it might consume her if she takes too wrong a step. The trees shift in their colour. Green to red, red to blue. She almost turns to Finn and asks, “do you feel it too?” She almost turns to Chewie and asks him the same. Both times, she swallows and smiles and whispers that she was just—thinking.

“It’s nothing,” she reassures them, “we carry on.”

The long grass makes progress slow. Sweat builds carefully on her brow, coming bit by bit. She wipes her palm across her forehead. It slides over her skin. Her outer robe is soaked underarm, and her back is damp. 

“We’ll have a break,” Rose announces, noticing the slower pace. “Ten minutes.”

Medics slip their packs from their shoulders, cricking their necks and sighing. Soldiers remove their jackets and tie them around their waists, pouring water from their canteens over the backs of their necks, cheered by the cold.

Rey slips off into the brush, away from the rest of the group, further into the trees. 

Her fingers work fast and loose over the fastenings of her belt. She strips off her outer robe until she’s just in her shirt and leggings. Pouring water onto her tongue, she swallows, savouring the taste (old scavenger habits die hard), pushing her fingers into her hair and pulling it back, tugging the tangles back into a hairstyle that’s unfamiliar to her now. 

Wearing the three buns again makes her feel childish. Less like a Jedi.

She feels a dull shiver at the back of her head. Her chest tightens, her heartbeat quickening for a sharp moment as she glances up.

Slowly, as the minute ticks by and the shiver fades into a natural shudder of her spine, she lets herself breathe.

She fears the next meeting. Every time she lets herself too near to the Force, or works too closely with it, she feels another signal, fluttering inside her like a second pulse, or the nerves before a mission.

It’s a secret she keeps to herself. They think she meditates in her chambers and comes up with the translations of the Jedi texts through communication with the Force. She lets them believe it, too tired and too scared to let them know what the truth really is. The translations come from hard, persistent work, matching ancient text with ancient text and there is no room for meditation. (Once upon a time, when flying to an island planet, she’d idly dreamed what it’d be like the legendary Luke Skywalker.)

She wanders further into the brush. The shimmer follows her through a canopy of trees, where the sunlight hardly breaks through. It’s inching forward now, surrounding the edges of her vision. Rey blinks, again and again. Her vision blurs. 

Sunlight scorches her eyes, blinding her for a moment. She throws up a hand at the heat, wincing.

The sudden heat mellows. A dull, beating ache fills her ears as she walks past the edge of the canopy. The bank of grass leads to the gully of a dried-up riverbed, orange dust moving with the wind. It flaps at the strands of her hair, loosening her buns. Rey narrows her eyes, inching closer.

A smell, an acrid smell, touches her nostrils. She leans forward, her fingers curving around the lip of the bank and her knees sinking into the long grass, to peer over. The smell strengthens, invading her nose to such a point that she retches, dry heaving and her throat clawing with the stench. She doubles back, her hand against her throat. 

The image remains in her head. Shimmering at the edges of her eyes, it’s the pallid, white skin of a deer, killed by a hunt. Its guts spewed and attracting flies, sticky black liquid spilling into the orange dirt.

“Rey.” She jumps at the hand on her shoulder. It’s Finn, and he frowns for a moment.

“Are you okay? We’re ready to move off.”

“I’m fine,” she lies easily, gathering her discarded robes and belt and stuffing them into her pack. “It’s hot.”

“You’re too used to snow and ice now, Rey,” he says, trying for a joke at Hoth’s expense.

“I think I am,” she replies. They fall into step, rejoining the others. “We need to get moving. Find the source of the signal before the First Order does. If it’s something precious, something Force-related…”

“The First Order will weaponise anything they can get their hands on,” Finn says, nodding. He addresses. “Rey’s right. Spare your rations, if you can. No more stops until we find that distress signal.”

Murmurs of agreement come from the group.

“We’re getting close,” Rose says, standing. Sweat glitters on her neck and the line of her jaw. With her free hand, as she watches her tracker, she fiddles idly with the pendant around her neck. The silver glints.

Rey turns away. With a low noise at the back of her throat, she orders the group to follow Rose’s lead. Rose hurries to the front of the group, standing side by side with Finn. Natural as breathing, his hand falls to the low of her back, his thumb rubbing circles into the material of her vest as they walk together. 

The dull shiver comes again. Rey closes her eyes, briefly, the sharp heightened breath returning to her. Chewie growls, curious eyes looking down at her as she tilts her head up to see him.

She smiles a small, quiet smile. Sweat soaks the lips of her wraps, beads of it rolling down the crest of her shoulders, to glisten on her skin.

She smiles wider at Chewie, almost laughing when she realises the dull shiver is still there. It’s clinging, cloying like a sweet on her tongue. With every moment it remains, she knows the chance of meeting again inches ever closer. 

She fears it, for reasons she can’t disclose, not even to herself. (Her greatest skill is hiding truth.) For now, she tells herself that she’s afraid because it’s a secret, still, what happened on the Supremacy, and what passed between them. It would risk the mission, the Resistance and her place in it if she were to be discovered now.

The truth, like this planet, has the power to swallow her whole.

“Maker, what is that?”

Rey pulls herself up, edging her way to the front of the group.

The shimmer invades her eyes, dulling her vision down to two small pinpricks. It’s like there is a wall between what she sees and what is before her.

What is before her is a deer. A deer that once had its guts spilt on orange dust, and now stands before them, white and translucent. Antlers sprout from its head, multi-stranded like vines, twisted up into one another. The creature is bone and flesh, with eyes dark as stars.

It turns its head, a soft whicker sounding from its throat. It’s only shards that Rey sees, like a reflection you catch in a mirror and linger on too closely, shy of your own self, your own being. The images switch and shift as she follows the deer.

The long grass is flattened and scorched, a fire still burning. The acrid smell is distant but it lingers in her throat. It’s already familiar to her.

“Whatever that was, it's gone now. C'mon,” Finn starts. Rey reaches out, touching her fingers to his elbow.

“What is it?” he murmurs, shrinking back to her side as the flank of soldiers files past them, following the lines of scorched earth.

“I think – something happened.” She swallows, edging carefully around the truth as she looks through pinholes at Finn. “The Force showed me something, back when we stopped.”

“You looked – out of it,” he concedes. He thought she was in a trance, meditating. She lets him carry on assuming.

“I don’t think we’ll find a weapon,” she murmurs, looking down towards the lines of burned grass. Dread stirs in her stomach, deep in the pit of it.

“Over here!” Rose’s voice distorts through the vision before her, low and without hope, but desperation.

Rey walks with Chewie as Finn runs ahead, his rifle in both hands. She hears Chewie’s gentle grunts and whines, but barely responds. Her saber at her side feels weightless, useless. When she looks down, it's just a minute part of her seen through an endless tunnel.

She ignites it anyway, forging light ahead for her and Chewie. The hilt is hot on her palm.

"We'll split up," she says to Chewie, the voice not quite her own. It reverberates in her head. Chewie nods, leaving her side. 

The back of her head buzzes, sharpening from its usual dull vibration. Still lingering, still holding on. Rey swats at the sweat gathering at her clavicle but her fingers gloss over her skin while her feet crush flowers underneath. Her wraps cling wetly to her arms.

Further through the grass, she walks. Above her the trees rustle, this way and that, folding and unfolding, their changing colours glittering where the shimmer does not cover her eyes. She blinks. Her cheeks feel wet.

To nowhere, is she walking. Just away. Whatever is contained in the crash site, beyond that scorched earth, it is something she will not walk away from, ever again. The crystal air and the shimmer in her eyes feels like a piece of freedom.

The roof of her mouth is dry when she finally stops underneath a tree that weeps, long trails of changing leaves threading against her hair, around her shoulders to curve loosely against her neck.

The wind comes, no relief from the heat, and bats the trails away.

She drinks clumsily from her canteen, dribbling cold water over her lips while her lightsaber vibrates in her palm. To her left, she hears a soft rustle of an approach.

When she turns her head, she tries to seem surprised. Among the weeping vines, the white antlered deer stands. It is a moment of silence that passes between them, creature to creature (even humans are creatures, atoms made into something), before the deer turns slowly away, breaking out from the vines into the shadows of the forest.

The trees whisper in its wake.

* * *

The moment she steps onto the scorched earth, right at the edge of the site, the shimmer shrinks. What is before her blows wide. The trees are too close, each face in front of her too detailed. She sees their eyes, brown and ochre and blue and ocean. The lines at the edges of their eyes that betray all their stories.

"Rey!" Rose sees her first, and hurries forward, throwing her arms around her neck. "Sorry. You've been gone for hours. Chewie said you were scouting? They've already stretchered him out."

"Finn?" she asks, focusing on the scene she sees. Three soldiers of the five wait for her, standing in a loosely formed circle. They drink from their canteens and clean their rifles and joke.

The space between Rose's brows crinkles.

"No. Rey. It's the Supreme Leader. It's Kylo Ren. We've captured Kylo Ren."

Dread lines a thread through her bloodstream, and what comes from her mouth is a dumb, numb, "oh".

Rose hugs her again, and Rey sinks into it, letting her assume as all others do. 

She fears their meeting. For the universe, she fears it.

* * *

He's not what we've been fighting, they keep saying. It's only until she sees him, behind a pane of glass, that she understands their paranoia. 

“We don’t know what kept him alive out there,” Dr Kalonia explains to Finn and Rose. They are symbiotic of one another now; barely able to acknowledge one without the existence of the other. “My medic staff reported no signs of flora or fauna around him. Not even water.”

He’s a shadow of himself. He’s not only thinner (he’s barely what he was, ribs showing where once it was flesh and muscle, designed to break) but he is sallow. His cheeks are hollow, his skin pale and muddied. There are old, crusted wounds on his temple, cheek and torso. His fight, his trauma, his torture, his resolve. His mask. It’s gone.

“The Force,” Rey says, speaking for the first time since their return to base. She folds her arms over her chest, back in a new set of clothes; Resistance clothes, the garments of a soldier like Finn. Her hair is still in its three buns.

Dr Kalonia, Finn and Rose all look at her, but she looks still at Kylo Ren.

“His connection to the Force kept him alive.”

She moves through Kalonia and Finn, towards the door that would lead into the room. It’s shining white, pumped with warm air and Finn tries lamely to call her back, thinking it’s her fire that stops her listening to him.

She draws up a chair in front of Ben before she can stop to think, the dread churning in her gut as his eyes remain on his feet, marked by long grass and dirt.

“I wouldn’t have survived as long as you did, out there.” If she was Poe Dameron, she would ask him why the First Order didn’t seek to rescue their great leader. If she was Finn, she would ask him why he survived. If she was anyone else, she would seek answers.

She has spent too many nights matching letter to letter, text to text, without the Force, to find answers.

“Ben… I know how you survived,” she says, when he is silent before her. She has met his silence before, but this is unnerving. Before, his silence has been everything; rage, hope, tender and harsh at once. This is nothing. Every mask has been stripped away from him, and that is what she fears.

With every minute of silence that ticks by (only moments when she looks steadily at him like this, taking in his form), fractures line her mask. Creeping across her cheek, against her jaw, over her eye, the fracture deepens into a split. As her eyes grow wet with the threat of tears, Ben finally looks up.

“You do.” It’s an echo of their second connection, when he was standing in the rain with her and she stubbornly called him a monster. He has the look he had then. Nothing of menace, but misery. He nods once. “Yes, you do.”

* * *

He is too unstable to be tried, that much is clear to the rest of the Resistance immediately. What information or testimony they could extract from him, through interrogation or the Force (Rey looks at her hands at Poe’s suggestion, hiding her fury with a soft clench of her fingers into her palm) would be too unreliable to use.

“We can’t kill him,” Rose says, in contribution to the circular discussion. “We’re winning this war and killing an unstable man without trial would undo all the work we’ve done.”

It’s a theory posited many times before, over and over, in different phrasing.

“I know,” Poe replies. He runs his fingers through his hair. “But he’s a criminal. We can’t let him go. And we can’t just keep him here indefinitely.”

They speak of him like he’s an inconvenient asset. Rey glances to Leia. She is quiet throughout the discussion, more symbol than general. Just as she is more symbol than Jedi.

“This isn’t my ground,” Rey says finally, her first motion in a debate heading nowhere. She rises from her seat, making her excuses. “I’ll be in my quarters if I’m needed.”

The elegance of a Jedi, followed by a sigh and her fingers rubbing her temple as she scurries out of the room.

She walks down corridors, left and right and then right again, opening the door to her quarters. Papers scatter around her feet as she moves forward, sitting at her desk. Her unused datapad sits dull and dark in front of her, while her shaky handwriting, the beginnings of her translations, sit around her feet in faded ink.

There’s a knock on the door, then the beep of a personal code that overrides all others. Leia Organa is respected, and Rey treats her as she must, jumping to her feet and bowing her head to the legendary general.

“General Organa.” Her voice sounds again, not of herself, but something rehearsed by another and put on her tongue. “I hope the talks went well.”

“Once you left, they collapsed,” Leia says bluntly. She sits on the bed, making no mention of the ink and paper and leather-bound books piled high on the desk. The utter rejection of technology. When she was a scavenger, technology was a commodity. She loved to fix things, to hook her thin fingers into something small and rearrange its fixings to make it spark and increase its value. The only thing she can fix now is something ancient and far, far bigger than herself or Ben.

“But the Resistance has come to a decision. My son is to live on Ahch-To.” Rey’s breathing catches, while Leia lets out a breath in a heavy sigh. “So many losses,” she murmurs, running her palm over her face and nestling her cheek against it.

“He could – still come back,” Rey says, her voice faltering in the face of informality.

“I wish he could.” Leia’s confession is intimate, and when she looks at Rey, Rey can’t help but feel she’s looking beyond her, into a certain past. “What happened to him, Rey? On that planet. What happened to you?”

Rey knows she cannot hide from the daughter of Darth Vader. She sits down at Leia’s side. Luke’s broken saber lies on her side table, the kyber crystal drained of all energy like its master.

“I don’t know. When I stepped on that planet, it felt like the Force… it was leading me somewhere. And I didn’t find it.”

Leia reaches forward, threading her fingers through Rey’s. She squeezes. “I think you did.”

“Do you?”

“The Jedi I saw enter that forest is not the one that left.” With her right hand, she cups Rey’s cheek. Her thumb draws over the tear hovering at her eyelash. “I think… if you find her again – you’ll find your answer.”

“How do you know?”

“The Force is kind. It gave me this last year. But it ruined my father. It ruined Luke. It took my mother from me,  _both_  of my mothers. The only way to fight it is to take its kindness.”

Finally, the tears slip from her, down her cheeks, as they did when a broken boy offered her a galaxy of burning stars. She hooks her arms around Leia’s neck and hugs the general tight.

“All I ask – let me see him.”

“Take as long as you want, General.”

* * *

Two suns give way to a single moonrise, lit orange by the planet’s earth. The crystal air is muddy now, thick with evening fog. In the corner of her eye, Rey sees the flowers bloom and close, bloom and close. The trees shiver, raining down leaves gently on her shoulders, in her hair.

“Are you afraid?” she asks Ben, glancing to her right. He treads a path he seems to know off by heart. She knows it too. Walking it now, walking it then in the sunlight, it feels like a path she’s known forever, like the knowledge of where she should walk to avoid the sinking sands in Jakku, or the path to the water’s edge on Ahch-To, and the cave that greeted her at her path.

“No,” he replies, his voice brutal with sudden sound after so much silence.

Walking into this shimmering, muddied air with Ben Solo feels like diving into that pool. The trees whisper promises of an answer, just as the thousand of selves had to her.

They walk through water-logged grass and climb over rocky ground.

“Have you seen this?” he asks her, as they approach the crash site hand in hand. It feels natural, to touch her palm to his; like the kiss a wife gives a husband.

“I couldn’t bear it.” She admits this while staring at him, watching his thin face shift and change, emotions passing through his eyes. He lingers on a kind of half-surprise, amusement buried underneath a narrow frown. He turns his body towards her as she wraps her arms around his waist. Even like this, so harrowed and broken, Ben is warm. He burns like a solar flare.

“Rey,” he whispers against her temple, lips following the word and his long fingers stroking the split tangles of her outgrown hair. He lifts her off her feet, and she lets herself dangle above the ground, moving to lock her arms around his neck. They sway together in the dark heat.

Eventually, he lets her go. He draws away from her, peering. His gaze slides backwards, glancing over his shoulder.

“Can you feel it?” she asks, following his gaze.

Among the vines of the weeping tree, the white pale stag stands. It is so still, Rey thinks for a moment that she has imagined its presence, that she might have imagined this whole mission. Her dreams are so often flesh and blood.

The stag lifts its head. The trees move again. From the air, snow white petals fall. It’s a flora she doesn’t know. It’s the Force at work, creating life on a whim. Rey outstretches her palms, catching the petals.

With each petal, comes a flash. An image in her head of a thousand different universes. Different faces, but the same tragedy. A union, dashed. A knight falls to the dark. A master sacrifices for his family. She sees her eyes in different people, and in herself. Different frames of time. In some, she has parents, and she is loved on a forest planet.

The sea crashes on Ahch-To and she breathes out hard before the Force aids her in a jump, from cliff edge to stone wall. A fish creature on a harpoon, she carries it on her shoulder, travelling back over the mountain into the valley.

 _Mum’s home!_ The voice echoes. The face is a little girl’s, black hair bound in three buns and her brown eyes gleaming. Ben is muscular and happy, with facial hair ghosting the line of his chin. He nuzzles her neck. A black-haired baby rests on his hip.

 _Welcome home_ , he says while a sunset glows gold.

The long grass bites into her knees as she sinks to the ground. Numbly, she wraps her arms around her waist, hugging herself. The petals fall past her face. Tears cling to her eyelashes, a sob bubbling from her lips in a clumsy, staggered barely human sound. She sounds like a creature. She _is_ a creature.

Ben collapses onto his knees beside her.

Around them is a carpet of the white petals. Rey sits still, flinching as thoughts of touching them, grasping them to find that vision again, her family again, pass through her head.

“What did you see?” she whispers, hesitantly turning her head and lifting her eyes.

His features, so hollow and set, crumple like sand in the rain, and he covers his eyes with his hands, curling in on himself as he weeps.

“You,” he says through tears, curling towards her, his fingers latching together at the small of her back, holding her tight. Quietly, softly, she wraps her legs around his waist, surrounding him with her.

The petals are soft on her back, on her side as they lie beside one another. Rey draws her palm down his chest, over his bones and skin to feel a heartbeat. With her other hand, she clasps his wrist and presses it to her chest.

She darts forward, pressing her lips to his forehead.

“Is this what it wanted?” he asks, like a lost boy with old and fresh tears.

“I don’t know,” she admits, stroking the nape of his neck. The shimmer hovers against her eyes, threatening to take him from her sight, leaving her only a shell. She drinks him in, savouring him. Is this what prey feels like, before it is hunted?

Of course, she had dreaded meeting him again. In battle, she was lethal. With him, against him. Whatever the situation, meeting him in battle meant power. Meeting him like this, the fractures in her features become cracks and she is faced with being a monster like him.

“All I want is you.”

She closes her eyes, tilting her forehead against his, and repeats her truth. “Just you,” she whispers.

“I know,” he sighs, with the trembling sigh of recent upheaval.

Rey places her chin on the crest of his head, his cheek against her heartbeat and his arms around her waist. The stag, still watching, still waiting, gives a slow single nod. It slinks back into the shadows. Rey watches it until she wonders if it was ever there at all.

Petals fall anew around them, the purple blooms of the planet, the wind sweeping away the white.

She knows now Leia’s words.

The Force is a monster of kindness, and to join with it is to be monstrous.

There is nothing more terrifying than forgiveness.

* * *

Ben sleeps while the supply ship darts through streaks of stars. Rey sits in the pilot seat, her knees curved up to her chest and her chin on her knees. Her hair falls long down her back.

Leaning forward, she presses in a private code.

“Rey?” Leia’s voice is groggy, as if she’s just awoke. Rey idly wonders how much time has passed.

“Tell Rose I’m giving her the Falcon. She’s the only one who can make sense out of those wires. Tell Finn…” Rey pauses, then shrugs. “That I love him.”

There’s a silence. “And the others?”

“Kylo Ren died. That I’m building a new Order, away from politics.”

“Rey,” Leia says, her voice clearer but no less old.

“Yes, General?”

“Thank you.”


End file.
